Anthony Comstock - The Smasher of Smut

Tony was not the kind of guy anyone enjoyed hanging out with.  To call him boring would be a little bit of an understatement.  The man's idea of a dirty joke involved two pigs sitting together in the mud.  His claimed view of a perfect day involved strolling through a meadow discussing the bible, though in reality it probably more involved sticking his nose where it was none of his business.  He didn't drink, smoke, gamble, or do any kind of vice whatsoever.  A veteran of the Civil War, Tony's biggest complaint of military life was all the profanity.  You've probably never heard of this kill-joy, but it is sufficient to say that he had a greater effect on censorship than any other American.

To be fair to Tony, it wasn't like he had that great of a start.  Born and raised in an ultra-conservative household, Tony found himself living in a world that was making him decidedly uncomfortable.  The America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a rapidly changing place.  Old Victorian ideals were beginning to give way to more liberal views towards art, sex, and women's rights.  At first, Tony had little to do with any of this.  He seemed mostly content to support his young family and work at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), which at the time did not have certain connotations suggested by the popular song by the Village People.  However, after his only child died in infancy, Tony seemed to completely lose his shit.  Grief can express itself in many ways.  For Tony his grief expressed itself via a declaration of war on moral corruption.

Tony became a founding member of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), which soon became famous for its work to suppress and ban any literary works it considered smutty.  Supported by the YMCA, Tony and the NYSSV roamed the streets of New York, monitoring newsstands for anything indecent.  In cases where smut was found, the dealers were quickly handed over to the proper authorities, who in thanks gave the NYSSV half of all fines levied as a result.  However, these early attempts did little to prevent the promulgation of smut, most of which traveled via the mail.  Tony, fully aware of this, began concentrating his energies into politics.  For some reason, few of the politicians of the day wanted to be branded the protectors of perverts, the result being that Tony got what would become known as the Comstock Act passed through Congress.  The Comstock Act made it illegal for anyone to mail erotica, contraceptives, abortion aids, sex toys, any materials with information regarding the previous, and even personal letters alluding to any sexual content.  To top it all off, Tony was given a position with the postal service as a special inspector, giving him the ability to go through people's mail as he pleased.

Given that at the time the Comstock Act was in effect, everything was mailed, this meant that nearly everything was censored in the U.S.  For Tony, the removal of smut was a matter of life and death.  In his view, smut led to a moral degradation which in turn led to venereal diseases, alcoholism, and drug addiction.  What exactly was smut you might ask?  Well, it was pretty much whatever Tony decided was smut, and his view on the matter was quite broad to the level that he even banned the mailing of anatomy textbooks.  Literature, plays, art, and science - none of it was safe from Tony's prudish wrath.  He quickly became the bane of most of the early civil liberties groups, but the darling of most of the church groups.  Regardless of what anybody thought of him, it does have to be admitted that Tony was a clever son of a bitch.  One of his favorite tactics was to, while pretending to be someone else, order lascivious items through the mail, only to have the senders arrested soon after the items’ arrival.  Over time Tony's investigations grew to include not just the distribution of pornography and contraceptives, but also women's rights materials and items related to commercial fraud.  Tony called himself “the weeder in God's garden”.

Over the four decades of Tony's career it is believed that he destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates used for printing, and nearly 4 million pictures.  Tony also liked to boast that he was responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides.  Many people chose to kill themselves rather than face the shame of a public trial, amongst them a prominent abortionist and the author of the first marriage manual.  For a time, J. Edgar Hoover studied under Tony to learn about his methods.  Late in life Tony was bashed over the head by an anonymous attacker.  This attack only made him more zealous in his cause.  Tony died at the age of seventy-one, unable to hold back the steadily rising tide of smut.  Throughout the 1920's and 1930's, court cases struck down the Comstock Act bit by bit.  However, the last parts weren't repealed until the 1970's.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Comstock.jpg

John Harvey Kellogg - A Bit of a Flake

Harvey had a lot of things going for him.  He was a highly respected medical doctor, a creative thinker, an upstanding member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the head of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, one of the most respected sanitariums of the late nineteenth century.  However, his life would have probably been better if he hadn't been so obsessed with sex and colons.

You might recognize Harvey's name from your box of breakfast cereal.  Harvey and his brother Willy were the inventors of corn flakes.  However, even this small invention caused turmoil in Harvey's life.  Harvey, a staunch Grahamite, believed that all foods should be as bland as possible, since delicious food apparently caused sexual excitement, which Harvey viewed as a negative for some reason.  Willy held the opposing view that sugar needed to be added because corn flakes tasted like cardboard.  The rift caused the brothers to found competing companies, which was further complicated when C.W. Post, a former patient of Harvey's, began making his own identical corn flakes.  So yeah, the entire dry cereal aisle was created by sexually repressed nut jobs.  Speaking of nuts, Harvey wasn't just nuts, he was also really into nuts, like a squirrel.  Harvey, a staunch vegetarian, believed that nuts would save the world from hunger, a fact he had no problem telling anyone within earshot.

Additionally, his obsession with sex was never what you could call a healthy one, and by that, we mean it wasn't healthy for anybody else.  Harvey got married at a young age, but refused to consummate the relationship.  This upset his wife somewhat in that she had been hoping to have children.  Harvey, ever a creative man, solved the problem by adopting forty-two orphans.  All in all, his wife was the lucky one.  Harvey had it in his head that sex that caused any kind of pleasure was most detrimental to one’s health.  However, even worse was masturbating.  Those vile souls that dared to touch their own genitals were doomed to blindness, degrading mental faculties, urinary diseases, cancer of the womb, and epilepsy.  In Harvey's own words countless people were "dying by their own hand."  To battle this national health epidemic, Harvey, as a medical doctor, adopted increasingly severe methods.  It started with the bandaging and tying of hands, which was followed by patented groin cages and electrical shocks.  When these methods didn't work, Harvey began sewing foreskins shut, then reversed his opinion and began circumcising boys (that's boys, not babies) without anesthetic.  Oh, and don't you worry, he didn't forget the gentler sex.  Girls were given a nice drop of carbolic acid on the clitoris, and in more severe cases, the clitoris was just cut off.

When not mutilating genitals, Harvey stayed busy running one of America's most successful and famous sanitariums.  Some of the most famous people of the time visited Battle Creek, including President Taft.  Upon arrival all patients had to provide Harvey with a stool sample, which he personally inspected to judge the health of his "victims".  Each patient was then given an enema by a device that would rapidly instill several gallons of water in an alarmingly short amount of time.  With their intestines squeaky clean, patients would then be given a course of yogurt, half of which was eaten, with the other half shoved up their ass.  Every day Harvey's patients were put through a series of breathing exercises and meal time marches to aid in digestion.  Harvey was also a big fan of both hydrotherapy (basically early day hot tubs) and phototherapy (sitting under heat lamps), both of which sound fairly benign, but again, Harvey was a creative man.  To save time he built a radiant heat bath, which was a hot tub full of electric heat lamps.  These baths were popular, though strangely quite a few people died of electrocution.  Of course, not everything was bad.  Harvey was also big on not smoking in a time when everyone was pretty onboard with it, so you know, being right one out of a hundred times ain't that bad.

As time went on Harvey's health claims slowly went out of vogue, which all together was a bit of a good thing, except for the whole anti-smoking part.  Though Harvey continued running a sanitarium until his death, as he aged he became more involved with other causes.  One of these was the belief that god resided in everything, and therefore everything should be worshipped like god, a belief that got him kicked out of the Seventh Day Adventists.  He also became a major supporter of eugenics, calling for racial segregation and the ending of immigration to preserve the all important American gene pool.  Though today largely regarded to be a nut, Harvey did live to be ninety-one.  Enjoy your fucking corn flakes.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Harvey_Kellogg_ggbain.15047.jpg

John Jeremiah Johnson - Liver Eater

JJ was a giant of a man.  He stood six foot two, weighed 260 pounds, and was reportedly cut like a Greek statue.  In short, he was not the kind of man you wanted to fuck around with.  Born to fairly boring parents in New Jersey in the early nineteenth century, JJ quickly got bored and decided it was time to skedaddle.  At age sixteen he joined the navy to fight in the Mexican War, but soon got in trouble for his habit of not obeying orders and punching his superior officers.  Given that the old timey navy used to hang people for such offenses, he quickly skedaddled and made his way north into the Rocky Mountains where he was adopted by a lonely old fur trapper who taught him the trade (of fur trapping that is).  JJ stayed in the Rockies for most of his life, working as a fur trapper and a wood hawk, which despite the cool name just meant he cut up wood for use on steamships.  Early in his career JJ married a woman of the Flathead Indian tribe, by which we mean he bought her from her father.  JJ, quite happy with his new bride, built her a cabin, and then left for the winter to tend his traps.  While he was gone a group of Crow Indians found the cabin and killed his wife.

JJ arrived back at the cabin in spring to find the skeletal remains of not only his wife, but also his unborn baby.  Understandably upset, JJ swore revenge against all Crow and went on a twenty-five year rampage.  JJ wandered the Rocky Mountains like some of kind of murderous phantom, killing any Crow he found.  People wandering the mountains, both Indians and whites, reported finding slain Crow scattered hither and thither, their heads scalped, and their livers cut out and consumed.  Yeah, that's right, he ate their livers.  Why?  Who the fuck knows.  Over the two and a half decades of JJ's rampage over 300 Crow were reportedly killed, making JJ one of the most proficient serial killers in American history, you know, if Americans of the time had considered Indians people.  Tales of these exploits were told around many a campfire and JJ was given the moniker Liver Eating Johnson, in part to help differentiate him from the other Johnson's of the area, which included Pear Loving Johnson and Long Toes Johnson.  What's that?  You've never heard of Pear Loving Johnson?  Well, that's probably because nobody gives a shit about you if your only claim to fame is that you really love pears, unless I guess there was a more literal meaning.

Anyways, the Crow, decidedly upset about the wanton murder, sent their best twenty warriors to kill JJ.  What exactly happened to this elite commando team is unknown, but none of them came back.  The Blackfoot tribe were somewhat luckier.  They managed to capture JJ by trickery.  They tied him up with leather thongs and made plans to give him as a gift to the Crow.  JJ, having none of that shit, ate the leather bindings, killed his guard with a single punch, and then used the guard's own knife to scalp him and cut off his leg.  JJ then used the unfortunate guard's severed leg as a club to battle his way out of the village.  It was a 200 mile journey to safety, one JJ made in the dead of winter, surviving by eating the leg, which he also used to kill a cougar.  Some might question why JJ didn't just eat the cougar, but then again, such questions are usually reserved for sane people.

After the whole eating a leg thing, JJ took a short break from serial killing to join the Union Army and fight in the Civil War as a sharpshooter.  After the war he went back to killing Crow until he finally got bored and declared a treaty.  The Crow were decidedly okay with this.  Vengeance had been done, and besides, JJ had gotten into the whiskey peddling business and living Crow drank significantly more whiskey than dead ones.  JJ continued to live in the Rockies for some time, even being appointed a deputy sheriff and then a town marshal in Montana for a time.  When JJ turned seventy-five he apparently decided it was time to die.  He wandered his way westward to Los Angeles, for god only knows what reason, and died in a veteran’s home a month later.  Seventy-four years later, a group of students successfully got his remains relocated to Wyoming, which from the surviving Crow's point of view, was probably not all that awesome.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Jeremiah_Johnson.gif